Cold
by antepathy
Summary: Blackout crashes in Iceland, and Barricade's the only one who can get there to repair him. A lesson in trust.


A/N Just a little genfic Barricade/Blackout.

"Barricade," Blackout said, prodding the stiff form. "Come on." Barricade shifted, roughly, his limbs groaning into movement. They were both low on energon, and Barricade—the slaggin' idiot—had siphoned some of his fluids into Blackout's systems. Because, Blackout berated himself, fraggin' Blackout here had gotten himself thoroughly shot up. Target locked. Again. Blown out of the air because he was so fixated on chasing the damn human fighter jets. Bitter humiliation, made even worse by the fact that Barricade had been the one to find him, the only one who had been small, and nimble, and persistent, enough to pick his way over the craggy, uneven ground of what the humans aptly called Iceland to find the smoldering twisted mass of the copter's crash, black against the brittle green of frozen wiry grass.

[***]

"Gettin' pretty slaggin' sick of repairing you," Barricade muttered.

"Shut up," Blackout retorted, temper thinned from pain. "Can't fight for slag; might as well be useful somehow."

He'd almost felt the insult strike home, heard a small, sharp intake of air, but Barricade merely ducked his head lower over the hoseclamp he was affixing. Guilt would hit him later, and shame, for stooping so low. Barricade could have left. Barricade could have mere stabilized him. Instead, the grounder had stayed through the horrible day, and the cold, more horrible night, walking a slow, steady perimeter around Blackout's inert form while his systems went through the agonizing process of initiating autorepair. The bitter cold of the night air ate into Blackout's systems without numbing them. He could hear pings of cooling metal whenever Barricade stopped moving.

"Recharge," Blackout croaked, come morning. The closest he dared come to an apology for his harsh words. He took Barricade's contemptuous glare as his due punishment. He had said something horrible, in a moment of pain, in a moment of weakness. He clung to this pain with almost as much force as he pushed away the pain of his wounds. This…he had earned.

So he lay there meekly, allowing Barricade to roll him onto his back, trying to ignore the strangely gentle care Barricade took to shift his rotors out of the way. Letting the thin chill air of the winter sun and the pain lull him into a restless daze, that seemed echoed by the fitful spatters of snowflakes that dulled the air.

"Storm coming," Barricade said, softly, turning his face to the west.

"You get Met?" Blackout asked, eagerly. Met meant contact. Others. Rescue.

Barricade shook his head, gouging into the soil, kicking up white chunks of stone that looked like frozen snow from the yellow sand. "Quartz foxing my uplink."

Blackout muttered a curse. Barricade flinched, as though Blackout's imprecation were an assault on his abilities. And he hated failing. That much, Blackout could understand.

"Flying's going to be rough," Barricade muttered. He held one of Blackout's rotors in his talons—it had snapped halfway along its length, the end blotted and seeping. Blackout ran a quick systems check—the gearing was mangled in his swashplate, and two of his teeter hinges were just…nonresponsive. Yeah. Barricade was right.

"I'll walk," Blackout said. Later, he added silently. When the pain subsided enough that he could move without his vidfeed whitelining from alarms. He tried to push down the skirls of fear as well. Grounded. Alone. His comm down, knocked out by a well-placed sabot.

As dusk settled around them, snow fell heavier, the wind biting sharply into chinks in Blackout's armor. The storm Barricade had predicted swept in on them, lighting the sky in a zero ceiling zero visibility blanket of pink. Snow assailed them: Blackout felt his joints icing as snow hit his warmer systems, melted and then refroze in the blast of icy air. He groaned, rolling to one side. "Get behind me," he muttered. "At least let me do that slaggin' much." He saw Barricade's optics—weary, struggling to focus—hone in upon his face. Blackout, capable of high-altitude flight, was better insulated for heat. Barricade…was not. Simple truth, but one as hard to swallow as any admission of need.

"Yeah," Barricade muttered, finally. He moved stiffly, dropping to his knees for the first time since his stabilizing repairs on the copter. He dropped hard onto one hand—Blackout felt the impact as the wrist tire banged against his back. Barricade inched downward, gingerly, until he'd pressed himself flat between Blackout's back and the ground, burrowing in the warm spot from Blackout's main engine, overheated from the stressload of repairs. "Don't need this," Barricade muttered.

"Harder to de-ice you," Blackout said, his voice rumbling through his frame. Yeah, you're welcome. Still, he felt the sudden laxness in Barricade's frame underneath him, actuators releasing, hydraulics hissing down. Some small comfort, then, Blackout thought. And that thought sustained him, that even immobile, useless, processing load clogged with autorepair, that he was some use. And, he hated to admit, he took a strange, humiliating animal comfort in the hum of another system against his.

[***]

"Barricade." Blackout struggled to keep the worry from his voice. His entire front was glazed thickly with ice, that crackled when he moved, splinters of it falling off, singing against the hard-frozen ground.

"What?" Barricade said, but his voice sounded strange, like an echo or a bad recording of his usual tone.

"Have to move," Blackout said. "We need energon." And replacement fluids for those Blackout had spilled over the ground in his hubris, and Barricade had sacrificed, silently. As if he could somehow redeem his weakness.

Barricade struggled to his feet, curses crackling from his vocalizer, refusing Blackout's offered hand with a blaze of prickling humiliation. He moved a few stiff steps down the slope before the icy ground swept his footing from under him. Blackout winced, feeling not only the shock and pain of the sudden fall, which snapped two pieces of the interceptor's skirting armor, but the humiliation of the flailing fall. He watched the interceptor flounder to his feet again, talons bunched in rage: at himself, at the treacherous ice, at the world. Barricade was always like this: cloaking his injured pride in hot rage.

It made nothing better, and Blackout knew that at some level Barricade knew it too, but was helpless—or afraid—to stop.

"I'll go," Blackout offered, inching down the slope. His heavier weight shoved through the ice, giving him surer footing. "I can fly us out."

"Can't," Barricade said. "Visibility. Damaged thrust vectoring capabilities. Low fuel."

Yes. All true. But. "Shut up. It's the only way."

"Not going to let you ruin my slaggin' repairs," Barricade said, hotly, but he stepped back as Blackout folded himself down, dented plates screeching against each other, knocked out of alignment.

"Your choice," Blackout said, rolling open his cargo door. "Coming?"

Barricade hesitated. Blackout could see the naked fear of loneliness, abandonment, written large across his face. Two full local orbitals stranded here alone had put a strange terror in Barricade that he hadn't had before. That, and the loss of Frenzy. Blackout waited, letting his rotors spin up slowly, warming the systems as gently as he could. Ice, built up on his rotors, cracked and flew off from the centrifugal force.

"Less load weight the better," Barricade said, finally, stepping back, hating the words as he said them.

"Get in," Blackout said. "I can handle it."

"Don't need your pity," Barricade snapped, his optics wide with panic, undercutting the bitterness he tried to use. He didn't need pity, or sympathy, but he desperately wanted it, or something close to it. "Get out on my own."

"You'll stay right slaggin' here," Blackout said, harshly. "Where I can find you. When I come back for you."

"You won't come back." The wind tore the whispered sentence from Barricade's vocalizer like a form of torture. An accusation. A primal terror.

"I will." Blackout's rotary system greenlighted. He checked his pitch controls, adjusted his angle into the howling wind. A terrestrial helicopter wouldn't have been able to get lift in this storm, but Blackout could. He lifted off, pausing to stow his groundwheels. "Come on. Or trust that I'll come back."

Barricade shivered, as if the cold finally reached him, his vents hissing through his electrum dentae. His talons bunched and released, as if trying to grab onto something ephemeral, like hope. His optics stared at the ground. "Go," he said, softly, as if in pain.


End file.
